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Pawprints In The Snow/Chapter Five
Chapter Five (Stareh) Nightwind crouched under a bush on the sidelines of the clearing, his fur pricked in stunned horror. The grass of the island was mucky, blood mixing with the soil under the green stems, forming clotted black puddles here and there that cats kept slipping in. Already there were bodies strewn about, lifeless, lying in pools of their own blood. One body, a slender tabby, was lying in its twisted death pose just a few fox-lengths from where Nightwind was cowering. What are you doing? You're a medicine cat! You're supposed to heal, not watch them die! But in the middle of this island, where was Nightwind supposed to find the herbs to heal? He had nothing, nothing but bloody grass and his own paws. Thinking fast, he crept backwards out of the bush, wincing as his bad leg snagged on a branch. The ThunderClan medicine cat's apprentice, Sorrelpaw, was caught in the fight, her claws raking through the ear of a ShadowClan tom. Nightwind sank his teeth into Sorrelpaw's tail, yanking her backward and out of the fight. Her opponent didn't seem to mind, whirling around to find another cat. "What are you doing?" the dark brown she-cat shrieked, yanking her tail out of Nightwind's teeth. "We're medicine cats," he snapped, lashing his gray tail. "We should be healing these cats, not fighting them!" Sorrelpaw looked stunned for a moment before hanging her head. "What can I do to help?" "Go deeper into the island. Find herbs - any herbs you can scent. It doesn't matter what they are, anything can be used." Sorrelpaw nodded once briskly and dashed off into the bushes, the tip of her brown tail waving as it slipped between some branches. Nightwind turned back to the battle and nearly gagged - a long-legged golden she-cat was lifting her forelegs in a lull in the fighting to examine a belly wound. The cut was jagged, the blood black and clotting, and dirt was clinging to the edges, turning them brown. She winced - a leaf had caught in her tangled, blood-soaked fur and poked into the wound. "You," the gray medicine cat called, and the injured she-cat lifted her head warily. "Come here." As if too weak to protest, she dragged herself over; her energy spent, she collapsed at Nightwind's paws, her belly injury pumping blood again. "What is your name?" he asked gently, rolling her over to get a look at her wound. He winced - it already smelled sour, like an infection, and the marks were jagged and deep. They would take a long time to heal - assuming this cat didn't bleed to death first. "Leafnose," she whimpered as Nightwind licked at the dirt clogging the sides of her belly. "of ShadowClan." Nightwing paused but went back to work, pressing his paws to her belly to try to stop the bleeding. I'm not going to let a cat die just because they're from ShadowClan! "I'm sleepy," Leafnose murmured suddenly, her head rolling on the ground. Nightwind stiffened. "Stay awake," he commanded, using his paws already on her belly to give the golden she-cat a shake. "Leafnose, don't sleep. I can't help you if you fall asleep. You need to stay awake-''" "Nightwind!" He swiveled his head around, relieved. Sorrelpaw, her brown fur dark with the mist of rain that had steadily began to fall, mixing the blood with mud to form a disgusting paste. But to his dismay, she carried not a single leaf in her jaws. "Where are the herbs? Sorrelpaw, I told you to-" "There's nothing, Nightwind. I scanned the whole island, twice. Not even a poppy seed head or a juniper bush. No cobwebs. There's nothing." Her green eyes scanned his, desperately looking for more instructions. But he could hear nothing but a rushing in his ears that replaced even the wailing and howling and crying of the battle. Slowly, he looked down at his paws. Leafnose was limp under him, her green eyes glassy and dull. He didn't need to check her neck to know he would find no pulse, no heartbeat. Slowly, he removed his paws from her belly; the dark gray fur, bleached to silver in the bright moonlight, was gloved in sticky black blood. Nightwind could only stare numbly at them for a moment before a thought struck him. ''In the bright moonlight. He threw his head back, heart sinking even lower in his chest. Yes, it was true - instead of the moon being covered by a thick layer of clouds to show StarClan's anger in them breaking the truce, it was still shining brightly, casting silver rays on the battle below. Nightwind felt sick. Leaving Leafnose's body where it lay, Nightwind shoved Sorrelpaw under a bush far from the fighting and crawled in after her, curling his tail around the apprentice. "We may not be able to save them," he whispered to her as she whimpered into his fur, "but we're not going to help them slaughter each other." Sorrelpaw kept her face tucked into Nightwind for the rest of the fight, but the RiverClan tom seemed unable to look away. He watched one tom get his ear completely torn off, leaving a bloody track on his skull where it used to be, and heard his screams echoing before he was forever silenced - his throat impaled by a thorny bramble branch when he was knocked off his paws by a cat racing past. A she-cat's claws sliced upward in one arc and her opponent fell to her paws, slit from the base of her tail to under her chin. The cat convulsed once, giving a gurgled cry, and went still, blood still trickling out of her open-hanging mouth. One tabby leaped onto the back of a bigger gray tom and wrapped its paws around the neck of the tom - a vicious twist, a crack that rang through the clearing above all other sounds, and the gray tom crumpled. Nightwind lost all sense of time, thought, feel. It could've been hours or moments since he had crawled under the bush with Sorrelpaw, but the fighting was suddenly over - all the cats seemed to have exhausted themselves to full capacity, unable to land a single blow more to an enemy. They sat, heaving for breath, clotted with blood and shaking with exhaustion. Nightwind heaved himself out of the bush, wincing as thorns caught at his fur. Horror struck him like a blow to the head - hardly any cats were still standing. Among the countless bodies littered in the clearing, he could pick out three of the leaders - Harestar, Crowstar, Gorsestar. All three of them were lying twisted in their own pools of blood. Greystar was standing off to the side, her eyes stretched with remorse as she licked at the pelt of a tom with a mangled body. Nightwind's heart twisted at the site of Iceclaw, the ThunderClan medicine cat and a close friend to him. The ground was wet with the blood-mud mixture, sucking in a cat's paws with each step. "What do we do?" a small voice called out. An apprentice, white fur smeared with blood, trembling as she cowered as close to the ground as she could get. The surviving cats looked around at eachother briefly before panic and shock seemed to crash down on all of them like a tidal wave - everyone turned and pelted for the tree-bridge, tripping over eachother in their haste. Some didn't even bother with the bridge, flinging themsevles into the water instead, kicking with strong strokes to get to shore as quickly as their bodies would allow. Nightwind let his mind blank out as he followed the tail of his Clanmate, Leopardstripe, who he suspected was heading for the RiverClan camp. Nightwind felt an icy shock as he plunged into the river after Leopardstripe, wading across to the opposite bank, which was the camp. His back leg, previously shattered after falling from a tree and healing wrong, was stiff and uncooperative. Nightwind was jerked from his blank reverie when his paws hit the pebbled bottom of the river. He kept low, counting on his dark gray fur to keep hidden in the dark stormy water of the river. He froze at what he saw as he peered over the bank. ThunderClan, their squirrely stench mixing with the familiar smells of fish in the air. A patrol of ThunderClan warriors, screeching as they battled with a group of RiverClan cats coming from the island. Nightwind clamped his teeth shut to keep from screeching. No! There's been too much fighting already! Already the RiverClan bodies were falling, blood staining the air, mingling with the fresh smell of the river gurgling nearby. Nightwind thought of his medicine den, the rock cave with its walls stuffed with herbs inside the camp. His paws itched to get ahold of cobweb and horsetail. Nightwind pulled himself through the water, slowly, making no sound. He kept close to the bank and skimmed around the knot of dying ThunderClan and RiverClan cats just by the entrance to camp. He made it inside with no cats yanking him back and slitting his throat, a fact that he sighed in relief over. But he had hardly made it past the brambles that marked the camp before a new stench sent him realing. Rabbit. Rabbit and fresh blood. Oh, no. WindClan couldn't have left much sooner before RiverClan was ambushed by ThunderClan. Every single cat that had been left in the RiverClan camp for the Gathering lay dead in the clearing with mutated, mangled bodies - everything was coated in a thin layer of blood, and the sickly sweet stench of death clung to the air like a kit to its mother's paws. Kits. The one litter of kits that had been in the Clan lay lined up like displayed fresh-kill near the nursery. All of them had snapped necks and bashed-in flanks. The elders were in the corner, one old she-cat's throat nearly completely torn away. Nightwind turned his head to the side, unable to fight the wave of bile that was expelled from his throat. I need to get out of here. Nightwind turned and burst through the camp entrance. Unsurprisingly the group of ThunderClan and RiverClan that had been fighting were all dead. Blood. Blood everywhere. How will I ever get the stench out of my nose? The sounds of screams out of my ears? Nightwind ran. Fueled by adrenaline, shock, and the choking need to get away from all the blood and fighting and screaming, he ran. Through RiverClan territory, up to the WindClan hills where he finally ran out of energy and collapsed on his side, gasping for breath like a fish out of water. From this height advantage, he could see a fire blazing in ThunderClan's territory, sending curls of smoke towards the stars. Stars. "StarClan!" Nightwind screeched, staring at the shining full moon. "Have you given up on the Clans completely? Is there no hope for us if our own ancestors allowed this blood bath to happen?" He got no reply, just the distant twinkling of stars. Nightwind took a deep breath and spoke the words he, as a medicine cat, would never thought he would say. "If you turn your back on us, I turn my back on you." And then, as if his faith in StarClan had been the only thing holding him up, he collapsed on his belly and gratefully gave in the black tidal wave that washed over him.